When I was growing up I lived on this street that would bet really hot in the summer. There was a spot where something had dragged across or pushed down the asphalt. Asphalt is also called
slurry and it's a mixture of tar, gravel and "aggregates" which is basically dirt and tiny crushed rock pieces. The road was pretty well sealed but some big machine, probably a big backhoe digging the ditches deeper, had probably set the shovel in the center of the street when it was very hot. There were drainage ditches on the sides of the road and they had to be dug out occasionally.
The machine had caused a big indentation and it had pushed down the top layer of the slurry seal so that there was just a big pool of tar, mostly. Most of the smaller pieces that hold it together and make it a solid surface had been pushed down, with the liquid hot tar rising to the surface. They didn't fix it for a long time and in the summer when it was really hot that part of the road would become very soft with liquid tar. If you walked in it, which all the kids did, you would sink in a little bit, and the bottom of your shoe would stick to it. It took effort to walk through it.
That's what this thread is like when rifke and Sea Salt start having one of their conversations. A tar pit that takes effort to get through. But it's not as fun as I remember.
